The secret to fold-out animation is careful management of anchor points and parenting. Wherever an element needs to pivot, it's anchor should be at the pivot point. Then, work backwards and adjust the rotation of your layers from fully extended to fully folded. Set each layer as a child to be parented with each layer that will fold before it.

Depends on the number of panels, I guess, but I really do think that this is one of the simpler things in the life of a graphics artist down to the point of being ridiculously trivial. Even if there are 20 panels in the comp, it's easy enough to animate them by hand and if you have the wits, you could facilitate this with expressions. For the latter, Trapcode Echospace could probably do it easily. And then of course there's also Card Dance... So many possibilities. If you get my meaning: Instead of wasting time looking for shortcuts, just start working on it. It's much less complicated and less daunting than it looks.